Africa

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Africa

This entry contains the following:

I. HISTORY
Sylvie Kandé

II. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL AGENDAS
Sylvie Kandé

I. HISTORY

The gendering of African studies constitutes one of the most significant epistemological breakthroughs in the last decades of the twentieth century. From the African Eve to the first African female elected president, women have indeed assumed a pivotal role in shaping African history, and, in turn, major historical episodes such as colonization and decolonization have considerably affected their status. Moreover, as African cultures have so far rested on the notions that at birth individuals are endowed with both a male and a female principle, and that the genders complement one another, women have been perceived as invaluable direct or symbolic participants in all domains of society.

The significance of African women's contributions has, however, often been played down by the combined forces of patriarchy and racism. African women who have internalized these repressive ideologies have often promoted practices detrimental to their health and freedom, such as clitoridectomy or arranged marriages, and have become the carriers of the heaviest loads in terms of production and reproduction, in exchange for a few counter-privileges, most notably in the spiritual realm. This awareness has encouraged new generations of African women to commit to change and self-representation, for both the preservation of their interests and the increased well-being of their continent as a whole.

PREHISTORY TO COLONIAL TIMES

The specific challenges attached to reconstituting African history—namely the preference shared by a number of African societies for an oral mode of memorization; the deleterious effect of climate, wars and poverty on existing documents; and the weight of a widely diffused corpus of texts and images that grossly distorted African realities—are compounded, when it comes to writing a history of women in precolonial times, with historiographical lacunae resulting from the gender-blind approach characteristic of both the humanities and social sciences, well into the 1990s. The relative disinterest for women as historical agents stems also from the nationalist climate in the midst of which African history gained recognition as a discipline: Emphasis was put on decolonizing knowledge, rather than on checking it for gender biases. New scholarship is actively working, not only at filling the gaps, but ultimately at gendering the disciplines.

"Pre-her-story"

According to genetic studies conducted in the mid-1980s, the most recent common matrilineal ancestor of humans alive today lived 150,000 years ago in East Africa. Through mitochondrial DNA—that is, organelles passed from mothers to offspring—scientists have reconstituted an unbroken line of daughters back to the so-called mitochondrial or African Eve. The ancillary idea that "Eve" is older than "Adam" similarly is related to some African myths of origin that ultimately "link human life directly with God through woman," according to the theologian John Mbiti. For instance, according to the Akposso people from Togo, God (Uwolowu), in his process of creation, first made a woman and bore with her the first child. For the Ibibio people of Nigeria, God is the mother-divinity called Eka Abassi. A Fon myth from Benin refers to Mawu, the supreme god, as the male or female offspring of a primordial mother, Nana Buluku.

Women could arguably be credited also with the Neolithic Revolution that occurred possibly as early as 16,000 bce in the Nile Valley. The invention of agriculture and the attendant process of sedentarization could be an extension of the previous task of plant gathering, probably undertaken by women who thus gained extensive knowledge about vegetation growth and reproduction (Laberge 2001). Several myths of origin corroborate this hypothesis: During a drought, Kipsigi women would have found a grass seed that had germinated in elephant dung. After tasting it, they planted more, enabling a stronger Kipsigi community to control the region located in what is today Kenya (Pala and Ly 1979). Indeed, from ancient times until the first decades of the twentieth century, agriculture in Africa remained the preserve of women, who developed a "hoe culture" everywhere except in the Sahel region (Baumann 1928).

Women in Ancient Egypt and Roman Africa (3000 bce–sixth century bce)

Ancient Egyptian civilization, born out of the demographic concentration around the Nile that accompanied the Sahara's desertification (9000–3000 bce), most likely granted women a unique form of gender equality, attested to by both Egyptian and foreign sources. Though made "ladies of the house" by marriage, women moved freely in and out of the public sphere without a veil. They could also theoretically serve in any professional position, from field hands to high priests. Documents show them steering cargo ships and holding scribal palettes as well—an indication that the female elite was literate. In the Old Kingdom, fifth to sixth dynasties, Peseshet, the first female physician in world history, headed a department of female colleagues, while Nebet was one of the two women who held the title of vizier, judge, and magistrate.

Endowed with full legal and economic rights, Egyptian women could independently manage property, sue in court, and enter into any type of contract. Though rarely pharaohs themselves, women, as carriers of the royal line, conferred authority to the rulers by marriage or filiation. The pharaoh himself had to rule in accordance with the principles of cosmic harmony symbolized by a female deity, Maat (Lumpkin 1984). Some royal women imposed themselves through their political or military genius. Queen Ahhotep (sixteenth dynasty, c. 1560–1530 bce) received the highest military decoration, the Order of the Fly, for her campaigns against the Hyksos. Queen Hatshepsut (eighteenth dynasty, r. 1503–1482 bce) was so revered for her campaigns against Nubia that her son ordered the obliteration of her images. Nefertiti (eighteenth dynasty, fourteenth century bce) ruled as co-regent with her husband, Akhenaton (also known as Amenhotep IV), and led a religious revolution. Arsinoeë II (c. 316–270 bce) was deified in her lifetime. Cleopatra (r. 51–30 bce), the last great ruler of the Ptolemaic era, committed suicide after a brilliant political career.

The names of women such as Perpetua and Monica remain attached to the history of early Christianity in Roman Africa. After a first mission was established in Alexandria in the first century ce, Christianity spread westward into Berber North Africa. One of the first North African Christian martyrs was Perpetua, a young mother born in Carthago who left a diary detailing her reasons for seeking martyrdom in 203. Monica, the mother of Aurelius Augustinus (354–430), also known as St. Augustine of Hippo, one of the founding fathers of Roman Christianity, was the main agent of his conversion. She accompanied her son, then a Manichaean, to Italy and begged Bishop Ambrose to mentor him. She died on their way back to Africa, shortly after his baptism in 387.

Women and Islam (seventh century ce–)

The spread of Islam into African societies from the seventh century on had an ambivalent effect on the status of women. Critical of the African premium placed on fecundity over chastity, Muslim visitors or African converts often sought to dismantle the existing local religions. They consequently undermined women's spiritual powers, while introducing limited reforms in their favor, such as the restriction of polygyny to four wives and the abolition of female circumcision in Timbuktu (Iliffe 2007). In its efforts to impose patrilineal rules of succession, Islam encountered resistance, as illustrated by the war waged by Kahina, a female Christian or Jewish leader of the matrilineal Berbers. After wrestling Carthage from Arab control, Kahina decided on an ill-fated scorched-earth policy, and she was eventually defeated in 702.

The literacy Islam brought to sub-Saharan Africa led, from the twelfth century on, to the opening of libraries to house Islamic texts, as well as learning centers for the African production of knowledge in various disciplines, from religion to prosody and from astronomy to the political sciences. Among the estimated one million manuscripts written in Timbuktu and its vicinity, a sizable number were either copied or written by women (Haidara, 1.3). Men of weight such as Sheikh Usman dan Fodio (1754–1817), sultan of the Sokoto califate and prominent Islamic scholar, condemned women's illiteracy in writing. His daughter, Nana Asma'u (1793–1864), a scholar and poet, launched the Yan Taru movement for African female intellectuals who made the hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca.

Women and Slavery

Valued workers, African women have been massively sold on the domestic (African), transatlantic, and Oriental markets. In fact, the majority of slaves in sub-Saharan Africa were women (Robertson and Klein 1983). Often kidnapped, as related in chapter two of Olaudah Equiano's autobiography (first published in 1789), women and girls were also pawned for debt repayment, as was the Nigerian novelist Buchi Emecheta's mother at the dawn of the twentieth century. Female slaves were particularly appreciated as wives or concubines because paternity rights were granted to their husbands/owners without dowry, and divorce was unattainable. In the first decades of the twentieth century, when domestic slavery was abolished by both British and French colonial administrations, concubines of elite men were often strategically ordered by the courts to remain in forced marriages. In dynastic societies, such as Dahomey (present-day Benin), female slaves played pivotal roles at the court. Twice barred from dynastic claims, they formed the king's personal guard as well as a pool of potential wives. The queen mother (symbolic "double" of the king rather than his biological mother) was usually a foreigner and a slave. In a few postcolonial African nations, such as Mauritania and the Sudan, enslavement of both women and men is still practiced on occasion.

Famous for their agricultural skills, women represented 35 percent of the human cargoes in the transatlantic slave trade. They were kept on the slave ship's deck to prevent them from inciting men to revolt, and to provide sexual gratification to the crew. One of these women who experienced the Middle Passage was Phillis Wheatley: Born in Africa around 1753, she became the first African American writer to be published. Conversely, some entrepreneurial women were beneficiaries of the transatlantic slave trade, such as the Euro-African signaras (ladies) from Senegambia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Brooks 1976).

The Oriental slave trade—which has never been officially abolished—deported a majority of the African women who were marched toward the East Coast or to Middle Eastern countries, where they served mostly as domestics and concubines. To illustrate the hardships inflicted upon women and children by Swahili or Arab merchants, French missionaries published the archetypal story of Swema, a Yao girl who was sold in 1865, buried alive in Zanzibar, and eventually rescued (Robertson and Klein 1983).

Women as Leaders

Conversely, examples of African women exerting direct political leadership abound, although their power depended on seniority, motherhood, and wealth. Semi-historical figures, such as Amina of Hausaland, credited to have extended fifteenth-, sixteenth-, or seventeenth-century Kano through military conquest, or Abla Pokou, the eighteenth-century founding mother of the Baule who sacrificed her infant to save her people, coexist with women leaders who distinguished themselves in the anticolonial struggle. Nzinga (c. 1581–1663) waged a quasi-lifelong war against the Portuguese who came to Angola in search of minerals and slaves. Dressed as a man, she is rumored to have kept a harem of young men performing as her "wives." Yaa Asantewa (c. 1840–1921), queen mother of one of the Ashanti states in Ghana, organized a massive rebellion against the protectorate imposed by the British in 1896. Her capture apparently required two thousand troops. Nehanda (c. 1863–1898), medium and leader of the Shona, fought against Cecil Rhodes's colonization of what is now Zimbabwe, and was hanged (Sweetman 1984). One of the lesser-known women fighters, Sarraounia of the Azna, who fought the French commanders Paul Voulet and Julien Chanoine in 1899, is the eponymous character in a 1986 film directed by Med Hondo and based on Abdoulaye Mamani's 1980 novel.

Women and Re/production

Until colonization, African women's main tasks consisted of the production of subsistence food, reproduction, and trade between economically complementary regions. State formation (and the husband's class), rules of descent, and religious and sometimes environmental contexts influenced the condition of women (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1994). But given women's dominance in the main economic sector—agriculture—their rights over land and cattle were generally protected (Pala and Ly 1979). Even if the cattle belonged to the male head of the family, women often received a few heads, and had access to a piece of land, which ensured at least their partial economic autonomy.

With a maximal fecundity ratio (one child every three years), African women have also held a "uterine power," as it were. Matriarchy was arguably the first state of human societies and the notion of descent through women still characterizes the "southern cradle" of the world, according to the historian Cheikh Anta Diop (1978). Indeed, a matriarchal belt skirts Central Africa; matriarchal clusters exist in Ghana and Senegambia, and residual matriarchal aspects, such as the notion of uterine kinship and the naming of the child after the mother, still have wide currency in early-twenty-first-century Africa. For instance, according to the Kikuyu myth of creation, Gikuyu and Moombi gave birth to nine daughters, after whom each of the nine main Kikuyu clans of the Moombi nation was named. For a long time, the all-powerful Moombi women practiced polyandry. Moombi men, having impregnated women, overthrew them, but could not, however, alter the clans' female names, which have lasted in Kenya into the twenty-first century. Moreover, the social importance of the female procreative function has generated specific institutions, such as "woman-to-woman marriage," by which an heirless woman could acquire rights over another woman's childbearing capacity (though not over her sexuality).

The dowry, while granting paternity rights to the husband, entitled a woman to her kin's help in times of crisis. Married women could request divorce, though in patriarchal communities they would lose their children to the father's family. In rural polygamous settings, the senior wife often had the upper hand in choosing a cowife to share her domestic and field work. Others examples of women's resourcefulness in reducing their oppression and labor included the circulation of children and the organization of "tontines" (French tontine was the equivalent of English "esusu" or "osusu," which became susu in Caribbean, where the institution survives; hence also known as "e/o susu"), that is, rotating associations for collective labor or money savings toward the completion of individual projects.

Women gained extra income and status through local and long-distance trade, and wealthy "market queens" in cities such as Onitsha, Lomé, or Accra (today named "Mama Benz" or "Nana Benz" after their chauffeured cars) have also acquired political influence. In 1850, for instance, Freetown women traders convinced the colonial authorities to build a new market, and, similarly, in 1977 market women obtained from the Guinean Marxist leader Sékou Touré the right to self-manage their market, as well as the legalization of private small trade (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1994).

Women's esoteric knowledge entitled them to major functions in nonmonotheistic religions. Involved in divination and witchcraft, women were often associated with rainmaking. For instance, Mujaji (Modjadji), the queen and rainmaker of the Lovedu, commands such respect that both Shaka (c. 1787–1828), the Zulu king, and Nelson Mandela (b. 1918), the South African political leader, invoked endorsement from the Mujaji of their respective eras. In addition, membership in female secret associations (such as the Sande or Bundu, a Mende initiation society in Sierra Leone) gave women a voice in communal decision-making processes.

Conclusion

The condition of African women in precolonial times, still insufficiently understood, remains at the core of an intense debate. Some scholars, such as Niara Sudarkasa (1996), have strived to demonstrate that "female" and "male" were clusters of statuses for which gender was one of the defining characteristics. Therefore, the normative gender stratification of the early twenty-first century did not exist in precolonial Africa, and women's participation in economic, political, religious, and artistic matters was deemed indispensable to the life of their societies. Others, such as Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch (1994), insist that women were trained from a young age, and often through harsh rituals, to submit to male power: Defined by the three Ss—silence, sacrifice, and service—they remained, though with notable exceptions, legal minors throughout their lives. From this vantage point, the glorification of their reproductive role appears to have been a mere compensation for the disregard they met in their productive functions. A clearer picture of the female condition in precolonial Africa would indeed require in-depth research on the plural and complex networks women simultaneously belonged to—an arrangement that was probably geared to offset some of the social handicaps they experienced in both patriarchal and matriarchal communities.

COLONIAL PERIOD

Colonization (1880s–1960s) affected African women in contradictory ways. To a large extent, they lost control of their own world, and their consulting role in the external affairs previously handled by men all but disappeared. Redirected toward cash crop production, they were also subjected to forced labor on plantations, taken as hostages to pressure men into meeting production quotas, recruited to perform sexual services, and sent to concentration camps (see the films by Jean-Marie Teno, Le malentendu colonial [The colonial misunderstanding 2004]; and Peter Bate, Congo: White King, Red Rubber, Black Death [2003]). Unaware of the system of parallel chieftancies, colonizers suppressed women's autonomous organizations, in possible connivance with African patriarchs. New laws made the husband the head of the household and imposed his name onto his wife. The dowry (lobola) calculated in cash came to signify a new commodification of gender relations (Mama 1996). Moreover, voting rights were granted to women much later in the colonies than in the metropole (Goerg 1997).

If a handful of women benefited from colonization, such as Madame Yoko, who served as paramount chief of the Kpaa-Mende of Sierra Leone from 1878 to 1908, the majority vigorously expressed discontent. In 1929 the attempt to impose taxation on women in Nigeria resulted in the Igbo Women's War, with ten thousand rural women demonstrating against their diminishing political rights. During the Franco-Algerian War (1954–1962), an estimated ten thousand Algerian women worked for the National Liberation Front (FLN), and one out of five arrests or killings involved a woman. Despite later controversies, Winnie Mandela, the "Mother of the Nation," remains the symbol of South African women's intrepid resistance against Apartheid. In all their conflicts with the colonial (and later the postcolonial) state, women have resorted to original strategies, such as sit-ins and invasions of officers' private space, derisive songs, and even nudity to signify social breakdown—the latter tactic used again in 1990 to condemn violence in Coôte d'Ivoire.

Yet, the colonial and postcolonial city has undeniably granted women more autonomy, allowing them to take on new social identities. Escaping rural constraints, women have found in Nairobi, Kampala, or Lagos new sources of income, in the area of services and commerce (including prostitution), enabling them to achieve home ownership, finance their children's studies, and sometimes travel abroad. They have become a vital part of the informal economic sector, outside of state control. Far from their kin, they have managed to negotiate transethnic or caste-blind marriages, and have sometimes established polyandric fiefs (Gondola 1997).

Similarly, the spread of Christianity, first by the Portuguese in the coastal areas as early as the fifteenth century, and then by European and American missionaries in the nineteenth century, resulted in both limiting and expanding African women's freedom. As civilization was presented to Africans as coterminal with Christianity, a number of cultural changes related to spirituality, matriarchal regime, and clothing were imposed by missionaries as religiously mandated. Although, as a result of this, women lost their spiritual powers, as well as the economic and personal independence that made divorce, for instance, an easy and common procedure, they seized a number of emancipatory opportunities offered by the new religion—namely, monogamy, deferral of marriage until adulthood, and access to literacy, education, and employment. Consequently, most early Christians in Africa were women: According to the historian John Iliffe (1995), they represented 80 percent of Anglican communicants in Abeokuta in 1878.

Women who found inspiration in the Biblical message but suffered racial or gender discrimination within the church often founded or joined African Independent Churches (AICs). Inaugurated in the Kongo with the Antonine movement spearheaded by Kimpa Vita (Beatriz of the Kongo) in the early eighteenth century, a tradition of female-headed independent churches developed in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Africa and was often fed by conflicts that arose from the colonial situation. The new converts wished either to Africanize the clergy or to Africanize Christianity itself. The issue of female circumcision, for instance, led thousands of Christians in Kenya in the 1920s and 1930s to leave Protestant churches to found their own (Labode 1999). Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton (1999) argues that women's participation in the AICs illustrates Africa's ability to reconcile the old and the new. The recurrence of founding mothers for these churches rested on the precolonial concept of female mediumship, and indeed the new religion often managed to incorporate elements of the local cults and spirit-possession practices. For instance, in the Luo Roho movement of western Kenya, a body of female soldiers (askeche) protected congregations, in line with a local tradition of women possessed by the spirit of slain warriors. Some of the most famous female heads of the AICs include Christianah Abiodun (Nigeria), Grace Tani (Ghana), Marie Lalou (Cote d'Ivoire), Mai Chaza (Zimbabwe), Alice Lenshina (Northern Rhodesia [present-day Zambia]), and Gaudencia Aoko (Kenya) (pp. 430-431).

Ultimately, men confiscated leadership in the AICs, and Christian conversions barely affected polygyny. Christianity, to some extent, presented itself as a foil for Islam, enabling it to construct itself as an anticolonial religion in nationalist eras. Yet, Christianity has grown to become one of the two major African religions, practiced in the early twenty-first century by close to 150 million women on the continent.

THE EARLY-TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY SITUATION

A Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations survey of nine African countries in 1996 revealed that women assume 70 percent of the agricultural activities and 100 percent of the food processing (Manuh 1998). They are also responsible for procuring 80 percent of water and fuel supplies. Consequently, they bear the brunt of Africa's increasingly limited access to natural resources, technology costs, obsolete customary laws, and economic migrations, which leave them in charge of men's former tasks. In Cameroon and Nigeria for instance, women have replaced cultivating yams (formerly handled by men) with cultivating the less time-consuming but less nutritious cassava.

The "feminization of poverty" results from a combination of factors: Globalization and its attendant constraints—prices established at the center, adjustment programs imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, corporations' initiatives such as genetic seed sterilization or large-scale fishing—play an important role in the development of this phenomenon. Illiteracy primarily affects girls, who are often taken from school for domestic chores or early marriages, and accounts in part for the scarcity of elected women officials. For instance, among the Togolese people over fifteen years of age, 60 percent of women as compared to 27 percent of men are illiterate (UNFPA 2000). In 2006 for the first time in African history, a woman was elected president, and this event took place in Liberia. In her inaugural address, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf pledged a "fundamental break" with decades of military and political violence in her country.

Multiple forms of violence are visited upon African women. In 2003 African nations agreed in Maputo, Mozambique, to end female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and punitive widowhood rituals. Yet the World Health Organization estimates that 40 percent of African women undergo some form of "body marking," such as lip and neck elongation, ablation of the uvula, or forced feeding (Coquery-Vidrovitch 1994). With new forms of war that primarily target civilians, women are killed, raped, or enslaved in disproportionate numbers throughout the African continent. Wangari Mathai, the Kenyan woman activist recipient of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize—the first African woman to receive this award—is convinced that there is an environmental root to wars. Her Green Belt movement, founded in 1977, has employed eighty thousand women to plant 15 million trees and combat government-sponsored deforestation. Moreover, women have become the main victims of the AIDS crisis that feeds, in the African context, on poverty, wars, displacements, illiteracy, and sexual violence. Its epicenter is in South Africa, and disenfranchised urban women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are particularly at risk. In spite of clear progress made in Central Africa, gender equality is ultimately the cure for the pandemic.

Regardless of patriarchal, colonial, or postcolonial repression, masses of women merchants and peasants, as well as some elite women, have fought over the years to transform their condition. Though a history of African feminism (which Gwendolyn Mikell [1994] describes as heterosexual, pro-natal, and concerned with survival) remains to be written, several women who have theorized their militant practices for gender equality stand out, including Adelaide Casely-Hayford (1868–1960, Sierra Leone), Aoua Kéita (1912–1980, Mali), Nawal El Saadawi (b. 1931, Egypt), Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (b. 1949, Nigeria), and Filomina Chioma Steady (Sierra Leone).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baumann, Hermann. 1928. "The Division of Work According to Sex in African Hoe Culture." Africa 1(3): 289-319.

Brooks, George E., Jr. 1976. "The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée: Women Entrepreneurs in Eighteenth-Century Senegal." In Women in Africa: Studies in Social and Economic Change, ed. Nancy J. Hafkin and Edna G. Bay. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Coquery-Vidrovitch, Catherine. 1994. Les Africaines: Histoire des femmes d'Afrique noire du XIXè au XXè siècle [The Africans: An History of Women of Sub-Saharan Africa, 19th-20th century]. Paris: Editions Desjonquères.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1978. The Cultural Unity of Black Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity. Chicago: Third World Press.

Emecheta, Buchi. 1977. The Slave Girl: A Novel. New York: Braziller.

Equiano, Olaudah. 1996. Equiano's Travels, abridged and ed. Paul Edwards. Oxford, UK: Heinemann. (Orig. pub. 1789.)

Goerg, Odile. 1997. "Femmes africaines et politique: Les colonisées au féminin en Afrique occidentale" [African Women and Politics: Colonized Women in West Africa]. Clio 6: 105-125.

Gondola, Ch. Didier. 1997. "Unies pour le meilleur et pour le pire: Femmes africaines et villes coloniales; Une histoire du métissage" [United in Good and Bad Times: African Women and Colonial Cities. An History of Hybridization]. Clio 6: 87-104.

Haidara, Abdul Kader. "Lumière sur les plus importantes bibliothèques à Tombouctou" [Insights on the Most Important Libraries in Timbuktu]. Available from http://www.ebad.ucad.sn/sites_heberges/manifestations/colloque_BN_2003/Akha%C3%AFdara.htm.

Hoehler-Fatton, Cynthia. 1999. "Christianity: Independent and Charismatic Churches in Africa." In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Iliffe, John. 2007. Africans: The History of a Continent. 2nd edition. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Laberge, Claude. 2001. "La deuxième révolution agricole: Notre déf." [The Second Agricultural Revolution: Our Challenge]. L'Agora, 48 (Summer). Available from http://agora.qc.ca/magazine/agora.nsf/Index/Agora.

Labode, Modupe. 1999. "Christianity, African: An Overview." In Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Lumpkin, Beatrice. 1984. "Hypatia and Women's Rights in Ancient Egypt." In Black Women in Antiquity, ed. Ivan Van Sertima. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.

Mama, Amina. 1996. "Women's Studies and Studies of Women in Africa during the 1990s." CODESRIA Working Paper Series, no. 5. Dakar, Senegal: Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA).

Mamani, Abdoulaye. 1980. Sarraounia: Le drame de la reine magicienne [The Tragedy of Queen-Magician Sarraounia]. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Manuh, Takyiwaa. 1998. "Women in Africa's development." Africa Recovery Online, a Publication of the United Nations 11. Available from http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/bpaper/maineng.htm.

Mbiti, John. 1988. "Flowers in the Garden: The Role of Women in African Religion," Cahiers des Religions Africaines 22: 69-82.

Mikell, Gwendolyn, ed. 1997. African Feminism: The Politics of Survival in Sub-Saharan Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Robertson, Claire C., and Martin A. Klein, eds. 1983. Women and Slavery in Africa. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Sudarkasa, Niara. 1996. "The 'Status of Women' in Indigenous African Societies." In Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Reader, ed. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Andrea Benton Rushing. 2nd edition. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Sweetman, David. 1984. Women Leaders in African History. London: Heinemann.

United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). 2000. State of World Population, 2000: People, Poverty, and Possibilities. New York: Author.

Sylvie Kandé

II. POLITICAL AND CULTURAL AGENDAS

From antiquity to the middle of the twentieth century, the European and North American production of knowledge on Africa distorted the image of that continent and its peoples by silencing or overpowering African voices. That situation resulted from what philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe has termed the "epistemological ethno-centrism" of the West (Mudimbe 1988, p. 15). Moreover, although a distinct European identity emerged in the fifteenth century from the colonial conquest of new lands and the concomitant invention of race and otherness, the birth of Africa as a self-defining cultural entity has been the product of the deportation of 12 million to 20 million Africans to Europe and the Americas over four centuries. Consequently, it was in the diaspora rather than on the continent itself and in the midst of suffering that a collective African identity first coalesced. Ironically, although Africa has been feminized in its relationship with Europe and North America, the African subject in discourses by Africans and non-Africans alike generally has been presumed to be male.

THE NAMING OF AFRICA

The process by which the African continent was named and mapped reflects the nature of European and Asian involvement in that region. Referred to as Ethiopia in both the Bible and Greek historical literature, the Africa known in antiquity encompassed the land west of Egypt (Libya) and the land east and south of Egypt up to contemporary Chad (Ethiopia). After the Romans invaded the African shores of the Mediterranean, they renamed their colonies, possibly after a local population, the Afers. The adoption of the Roman name Africa in its Arabicized form Ifriqiya by the Muslim armies that marched through the Sahara from the seventh century on inscribed that project in the same colonial tradition. Similarly, from the fifteenth century on the name Africa came to be applied to the various coastal locations discovered by Portuguese navigators and eventually to the land mass defined by Bartolomeu Diaz's (1457–1500) 1488 circumnavigation of South Africa.

However, it was the sixteenth-century German cartographer Mercator (1512–1594) who imposed a still insufficiently challenged image of Africa. Compressing the southern hemisphere to a third of the world map, the Mercator projection gives Africa a rounded, somewhat passive form that must have echoed the notion of femininity in the chauvinistic world of the Renaissance, as emblematized by Vesalius and Durer's voyeuristic dissections of the female body (Brotton 2002). Later African allegories also often associated animals or monsters and a black woman, the Other, who "in [her] abnormal differences, specifies the identity of the Same" (Mudimbe 1988, p. 12).

EARLY IMAGES AND CHARACTERIZATIONS

For classics scholar Frank Snowden, Jr., Greek historians' terminological decision to call Ethiopians (burnt faces) both non-Egyptian Africans and Indians exemplifies the Greeks' exoticist yet nonracialist vision of the world, whereas Mudimbe sees a tradition of locating Africans in a "geography of monstruosity" (1994, p. 78), emerging in Herodotus (484–425 bce) resurfacing in Pliny (23–79 ce), and redeployed in nineteenth-century European and North American anthropologists' writings (1988, p. 71). The institution of slavery contributed to social discrimination against Africans in the Arab world, regardless of the lack of racial prejudice in the Koran and despite the literary, musical, religious, and military contributions of Africans to Muslim societies. The descriptions of Sudanese empires left by Arab scholars such as Al-Fazari (eighth century), Al-Bakri (eleventh century), and Ibn Battuta (fourteenth century), though colored by their interest in gold and conversion, constitute invaluable sources for the reconstitution of medieval African history. Al-Bakri, for instance, alludes to the matriarchal organization at the court of Ghana, to men with shaved beards and women with shaved heads, and to the king's female adornments (Shillington 2005).

Until the High Middle Ages Africa in the European imagination was associated with fabulous places, such as the kingdom of Prester John, a legendary Christian priest-king identified as the Abyssinian ruler, or larger-than-life figures, such as Mansa Musa (1312–1327), the emperor of Mali, who was represented holding a gold nugget by Abraham Cresques (d. 1387) in his 1375 world map. Spectacular embassies from Senegambia, the Kongo, and Ethiopia created long-lasting impressions and led to both more realistic portrayals of Africans and the introduction of the new convention of the dark-skinned Magus in the nativity scene (Northup 2002).

SLAVERY AND COLONIALISM

The massive transportation of enslaved Africans to the Americas required new narratives and new images. As Eric Williams (1994) argues, economic motives caused slavery, which in turn caused racism. As Africa became a reservoir of free laborers, Africans became Ham's offspring cursed by Noah, a race defined by the excesses of local climate and devoid of intellectual abilities and human feelings. Many of the most important modern thinkers subscribed to those notions, from Voltaire (1694–1778) to Hegel (1770–1831).

Colonialism reinforced the previous stereotypes. In the overarching European and North American dualism that subordinates nature to culture, the colonized subject was assimilated to nature and subtly feminized, sparing experts the need to compare African women's precolonial and colonial conditions. For instance, the system of dual chieftaincy in Nigeria, with both a female leader and a male leader, was ignored in gender-blind studies and destroyed by British indirect rule, which supported male leadership only. Though gender is a central element in any analysis of kinship, linguistics, division of labor, use of space, memory, and religion, African women were both caricatured and neglected in anthropological studies.

The case of Saartjie Baartman (1789–1815), the Hottentot Venus, is the attempt by scientific racism to locate sites of bestiality on the African female body. Brought from southern Africa to Europe in 1810, Baartman was exhibited in zoos and shows for her prominent buttocks and offered money by the French anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) to have her Hottentot apron examined. Her skeleton, genital parts, and brain were dissected after her death and preserved in the Musée de l'Homme in Paris until 1974 and were not returned to South Africa until 2002 (Bancel and Blanchard 2004).

Even after the 1920s anthropologists who participated in the deconstruction of the hegemonic notion of civilization and practiced participant observation in African societies paid less attention to women than photographers did. These photographic images show, however, ahistorical women, or "metaphors for a continent willing to be possessed and penetrated by the white man" (Boetsch and Savarese 1999, p. 130), that speak primarily of colonial desires. The French anthropologist Denise Paulme wrote in the 1985 introduction to Women of Tropical Africa (1960) that she "regretted most not to have previously worked with women. The image [she] brought back was that of a male world" (Héritier, p. 7). This first ethnological work dedicated to African women has been criticized for being a celebration of heroines intended to counter the colonial discourse that had portrayed African women as enslaved to an indigenous patriarchal order, and to illustrate the feasibility of the political and economic equality that the second wave of European and North American feminists demanded for themselves (Becker 2005).

AFRICANISM AND FEMINISM

Africanism, or knowledge about Africa, constituted itself in the mid-1950s through a fusion of anthropology and other disciplines (Mudimbe 1994). The field of Africanist gender studies has been dominated by anthropologists and historians since its inception in the 1960s and 1970s, though literary critics have contributed their expertise and creativity (Becker 2005). Both fields have been challenged to decolonize knowledge before and after independence.

After another shift from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s with the return of the African-woman-as-victim paradigm, more recent feminist scholarship has deconstructed woman as a unitary category and begun examining the previously unquestioned gender roles of men. Although black feminists such as Oyeronke Oyewumi (2004) and Niara Sudarkasa (b. 1938) have questioned the existence of gender in precolonial times, it may seem that women's condition as that of a "missing person[s] whose structure of difference produces the hybridity of race and sexuality in the postcolonial discourse" (Bhabha 1994, p. 53) has not been used sufficiently to theorize women's negotiations of gender roles and tensions between traditions and modernities, both at home and in situations of migration. However, the brand of African feminism delineated in the 1980s by Filomina Steady (1996), who advocated a rehabilitation of precolonial gender dynamics, sisterhood, and a bigendered fight against racism, has been challenged by social scientists such as Mamphela Ramphele (b. 1947). Stating that "men do not hold the monopoly over the potential to dominate," she suggests that viable intervention strategies should take in consideration "the various social hierarchies that shape and are shaped by gender" (Olukoshi and Nyamnjoh 2006, p. 2).

PAN-AFRICANISM

The idea of a common African/black identity results from the collective experience of the Middle Passage that turned various slave ports on the African coast and their adjacent hinterlands into a "Motherland" and the European ideological justification for that operation—race—into a factor in unity and even a political agenda. The term diaspora, which was borrowed from Jewish history to account for the scattering of Africans throughout the world, rests on the notion of a lost original wholeness. Indeed, the dream of returning to the womb, clandestinely carried into the hole of the slave ship by the naked migrants (in W. W. Glissant's [1992] terms), provided an alternative to the stereotype of a quintessentially hostile African environment. It has assigned the aspirations of slaves and their descendants to another spiritual or political order. The afterlife, for instance, entailed a recrossing of the ocean back home to Guinea, a metonymy of the continent as a whole; that myth also gave several layers of meaning to the recurrent references to boats and the Promised Land in spirituals. Similarly, early diasporic nations, from Maroon communities to the Haitian Republic, can be interpreted as enclaves in which institutions and social life mimicked an African model (Kandé 1998).

Not surprisingly, it was from Haiti, a Caribbean island under attack for its early political independence and its African cultural retentions, that there came an immediate refutation of Gobineau's thesis on the inequality of races. Though Anténor Firmin's book De l'Egalité des races humaines (1885) was not engaged with in French intellectual circles (Magloire-Danton 2005), its existence and arguments constitute a landmark in the history of the pan-African movement.

Pan-Africanism is a movement born in the diaspora that proclaims the centrality of Africa and acknowledges the bond created by a common experience of enslavement, colonialism, and racism among all people of African descent. Not surprisingly, a 1389 Chinese map and the 1402 Korean Kangnido anticipated the first accurate European map of southern Africa (1502), as the exchanges between China and the eastern coast of Africa that began as early as the second century bce intensified between the eight and the fifteenth centuries ce and works toward the liberation of the Motherland. Pan-Africanism, which ideologically brought together black internationalists as diverse as E. W. Blyden (1832–1912), Marcus Garvey (1887–1940), Adelaide Casely Hayford (1868–1960), Tovalou-Quenum, C. L. R. James (1901–1989), and Malcolm X (1925–1965), has a cultural wing represented by the Francophone Négritude movement of the 1930s to the 1960s led by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), Aimé Césaire (b. 1913), and Léon Gontran Damas (1912–1978). The writings of those scholars were aimed specifically at the rehabilitation of the African past.

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972), the first president of Ghana, made pan-Africanism a state ideology, insisting on the necessity for Africans to reconcile themselves to their triple heritage: precolonial, Euro-Christian, and Muslim. He also pointed out that "the degree of a country's revolutionary awareness may be measured by the political maturity of its women" (Nkrumah 1969, p. 131). Another pan-Africanist head of state, Thomas Sankara (1949–1987), took steps to draw attention to the plight of women in Burkina Faso, condemning female circumcision and polygamy and establishing a market day for men.

THE CONTEMPORARY SITUATION

The competition to (re)imagine Africa has become fiercer than ever. Superpowers and transnational companies have become interested in African mineral resources—diamonds, uranium, and oil—fostering political instability in regions of their production. Furthermore, troubled or impoverished nations sometimes are chosen to receive factories that exploit cheap local labor for international brands or to become dumping grounds for nuclear waste. Meanwhile, the major interest of tourists remains observing the fauna and flora in natural reserves such as the Chewore in Zimbabwe and the W park in Niger.

International public expectations about Africa are conditioned by stereotypes that are propagated widely by the mass media. Those stereotypes undermine the credibility of African endeavors to establish viable civil societies that can compete in international markets and in the intellectual realm, confining African contributions to the visual and performing arts. Many of those stereotypes have found an additional outlet in an Afro-pessimist discourse according to which AIDS will depopulate Africa, the high fecundity rate responsible for famine and emigration, and male polygamy is the rule.

Although the African continent has paid the heaviest toll in the AIDS pandemic, positive results have been obtained, most notably in Uganda but also in Senegal, thanks to an array of strategies, including grassroots work. Noreen Koleba, the female head of TASO (The AIDS Support Organization) in Uganda, emblematizes the African fight against AIDS.

Although Africa still has the world's highest African fecundity ratio with six children per woman in sixteen of its countries, those figures have to be understood in a historical perspective. The second largest continent, Africa accounted for 14 percent of the world population in 1700 and only 6 percent in 1900. The fecundity ratio must be reevaluated in light of the mortality ratio and an average life expectancy of forty-eight years, and the African mortality ratio (9.6% compared with 0.7% in developed countries). Even with a number of megalopoles, the African continent is underpopulated. Birth rates, in decline since the 1990s, were expected to decrease significantly in the first decades of the twenty-first century, and the concomitant aging of the population in the absence of social coverage is the most significant threat that looms over Africa.

Well rooted in rural and urban African societies, the institution of polygamy is limited and declining. Polygamous husbands have on average 2 to 2.5 wives. Flourishing in precolonial rural settings in the absence of land ownership, polygamy has become costly for city dwellers and thus has become a status symbol. It is also often the result of first arranged marriages with relatives. Challenges to the traditional meaning attached to marriage and gender relations and to elder brothers' ability to control their siblings' unions, coupled with a rise in the matrimonial age for educated girls, have been eroding the institution slowly (Courade 2006).

The ability of scholars of Africa to diffuse alternative views is a key factor in epistemological change. Much of the early work was done by the Egyptologist Cheikh Anta Diop (1974), who succeeded in reinserting Egypt on the African map and proving its ties to other sub-Saharan cultures. The deciphering of the libraries in the sand in the vicinity of Timbuktu represents the next crucial step. Tens of thousands of manuscripts redacted in African languages but written in Arabic script and covering subjects from astronomy to poetry are being exhumed. Some of them were produced at the time of the European invention of the printing press and have the potential to change the global understanding of African intellectual history.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Becker, Heike. 2005. "Review of Andrea Corwall, ed." Readings in Gender in Africa." H-SAfrica. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Bancel, Nicolas, Pascal Blanchard, et al. 2004. Zoos humains: Au temps des exhibitions humaines. Paris: Découverte.

Bhabha, Homi. 1994. Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Boetsh, Gilles, and Eric Savarese. 1999. "Le corps de l'Africaine: Erotisation et inversion." Cahiers d'Etudes Africaine 153: 5-12

Brotton, Jerry. 2002. The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Courade, Georges. 2006. L'Afrique des idées recues. Paris: Belin.

Diop, Cheikh Anta. 1974. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook. New York: L. Hill Books.

Glissant, Edouard. 1992. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Jean-Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

Heritier, Francoise. 1999. "Denise Paulme-Schaeffner (1909–1998) ou l'histoire d'une volonté" Cahiers d'Etudes Africaines XXXIX (1) 153: 5-12.

Kandé, Sylvie. 1998. Terres, urbanisme et architecture "créoles" en Sierra Leone XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Paris: L'Harmattan.

Magloire-Danton, Gérarde. 2005. "Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism." Small Axe 9(2): 150-172.

Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Mudimbe, V. Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nkrumah, Kwame. 1969. Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah: Freedom Fighters' Edition. New York: International Publishers.

Northrup, David. 2002. Africa's Discovery of Europe, 1450–1850. New York: Oxford University Press.

Olukoshi, Abedayo, and Francis B. Nyamnjoh. 2006. "The African Woman." CODESRIA Bulletin 1/2: 1-2.

Oyewumi, Oyeronke. 2004. "Conceptualizing Gender: Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies." JENda 2(1): 1-8.

Paulme, Denise, ed. 1960. Femmes d'Afrique noire. Paris: Mouton.

Shillington, Kevin. 2005. History of Africa. Oxford: Macmillan Education.

Steady, Filomina. 1996. "African Feminism: A Worldwide Perspective." In Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, eds. Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Andrea Benton Rushing. Washington, DC: Howard University Press.

Williams, Eric. 1994. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Sylvie Kandé

III. ART AND LITERATURE

African arts are an ancient component of world heritage. The discovery of 77,000-year-old artifacts—including chunks of ochre engraved with geometric patterns—in the Blombos cave of South Africa reveals that creative and symbolic thinking associated with behavioral modernity first appeared in Africa. It had previously been assumed that rock paintings, which depict with significant regional and chromic variations, humans, animals and therianthropes (semihuman, semianimal creatures), were Africa's oldest form of art.

African arts is, however, a deceptive label that privileges visual arts (and sculpture more specifically) over architecture, textiles, body adornment, performing arts, or literature. Indeed, for the European and North American public, wooden masks have become emblematic of African art—although museification has generally deprived these objects of their dramatic function. Additionally, the notion of African arts often still refers to sub-Saharan artistic production, regardless of the region's crucial ties with North Africa and Ancient Egypt. Indeed, cultural historian Amadou Hampate Ba (1900 or 1901–1991) was able to identify evidence of such interactions in rock paintings representing proto-Fulani ceremonies at the prehistoric site of Tassili-n-Ajjer. Ancient Egypt clearly shares with the rest of Africa a number of aesthetic conventions. For instance, African carvers from Egypt and beyond routinely emphasize rulers' smooth facial features to symbolize the well-being of the land, and adorn them—even some female rulers—with the beard of wisdom. Implicit in the notion of African arts is also the culturally irrelevant distinction between fine arts and popular crafts, challenged by the exquisite treatment of an array of ordinary objects, from the Dogon heddle pulleys and the Kasai velours, to the Zulu spoons and Ashanti combs. This distinction has devalued women's artistic activities, with the exception of the famous Ndebele house painting tradition that South African painter Esther Mahlangu (b. 1935) has reinterpreted.

The belated, though enthusiastic, reception African arts elicited in early twentieth-century Europe ultimately opened a thorough questioning of the universal nature of European and North American aesthetic conventions and categories. African arts not only provided European and North American artists with new aesthetic solutions, but also gave anticolonial African intellectuals tangible evidence of an African philosophy needed to prepare for decolonization.

In modern Africa, whereas the local production of arts and crafts is generally strained by the importation of European and North American commodities and tourists' demands for affordable exotica that have replaced African patronage, a growing number of artists are attempting to redefine their role as either culture brokers or unaligned talents and as economic agents on the transnational art market. Appropriating media, techniques, and vocabulary, both from the contemporary European and North American art scene and from precolonial African aesthetic traditions, those artists have created bold fusions, or métissages. Women artists, in particular have been daring in crossing aesthetic and social boundaries.

Contemporary African art demonstrates an acute awareness of international events, global crises, and their local implications, studied by intensely committed artists whose gaze may nevertheless seem distanced, cruel, or sarcastic. Whereas power figures (nkissi) are locally being created in response to the AIDS pandemic, Congolese painter Cheri Samba (b. 1956) depicts its urban daily reality in a cartoon-like way; Kofi Setordji (b. 1957) (Ghana) created a monument to the 800,000 victims of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and painter Sylvia Katende (b. 1961) (Uganda) engages her audiences on politicofeminist themes, such as sustainable development.

African arts are infinitely diverse and resist totalizing aesthetic definitions. Indeed, the paradoxical absence of a signifier for art in African languages suggests a thorough dissemination of artistic creativity throughout all aspects of individual and collective life. African arts transcend binary oppositions, such as religious versus secular, high art versus crafts, and culture versus nature. Indeed, spiritually charged masks or statues are also utilitarian objects in the context of rituals ensuring social balance: Akuaba dolls, for instance, before transiting to shrines, are carried and nursed by Ashanti women seeking fertility. Moreover, the same category of objects, for instance, staffs or stools, may have several competing functions, both material and symbolic.

By and large, criteria of aesthetic achievement in African arts include inventiveness within an established tradition, a combination of abstraction with naturalism, repetition and contrast, and gender complementarity. A dance performance is evaluated in terms of both its faithful execution of known (and clearly gendered) steps and its sense of individual improvisation and self-celebration. Similarly, the fame of the headrests from the nineteenth-century Kinkondja workshop (Congo) results from their conformity with but also their divergence from Luba conventions—apparent in the cascading treatment of the hair. Furthermore, on sculptures, naturalistic features (face, sex, hairdo, or scarifications) routinely coexist with enlarged body parts or emphatic volumes: prominent heads suggest inner vision and rounded breasts, fertility. Protrusions highlight the role of the face's orifices as contact zones between human and divine realms. Ubiquitous patterns account for both symmetry and movement in sculptures, for textiles' geometric designs, and for polyrhythm in musical compositions that corresponds to polycentrism in dances: Each part of the body, responding to a selected rhythm, moves in isolation from yet in coherence with the others.

The notion of gender complementarity permeates African arts, governing even the type of artistic activity undertaken. In casted societies, griots and griottes can perform oral texts, though the recitation of epics or royal genealogies are generally a male preserve. Blacksmiths can also be wood sculptors and jewelers, whereas their wives specialize in pottery making. Sculptures representing a pair of founding ancestors illustrate the paramount importance of achieving a unified vision of personhood and community through association of genders. The Dogon male associations meeting chambers are supported by posts adorned with female figures in a similar concern for gender balance. The same artifact often unites male and female attributes, as does the Queen of Holo carving that evokes Nzinga, the ideal ruler.

African societies have, with notable exceptions such as ancient Egypt and Ethiopia, chosen orality over writing for textual preservation and communication. An immense and constantly renewed corpus, oral literature encompasses compositions varying from diminutive proverbs to lengthy epics (such as the thirteenth-century Sunjata' epic that relates the foundation of the Mali empire), and several uniquely African genres, such as southern African praise poems (izibongo). African oral texts are generally conceived for performance and are accompanied by music and dancing. Memorialists include men and women.

The spread of Islam brought to the northern, western and eastern regions a new script that literate African Muslims used to transcribe oral literature and to create new texts. From the fifteenth century on, Timbuktu was the center of an intense production of manuscripts (some of them authored or copied by women) on a variety of subjects written in Arabic language or script.

Modern literature of Africa written in the colonial or excolonial languages emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century, with the limitations imposed by the colonial order. The Negritude movement, initiated in the 1930s by a group of Francophone writers—chief among them Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001), who eventually would be elected into the French Academy—represents the first attempt to define an autonomous African literary aesthetics. Negritude has been criticized for its allegedly essentialist vision of racial relations and its inability to promote women's poetic expression. After World War II (1939–1945), major authors asserted themselves, such as Chinua Achebe, with his seminal novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), and Wole Soyinka (b. 1934), who was granted the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1986. Ngugi Wa Thiongo (b. 1938) has promoted modern African literature written in African languages by publishing some of his novels in the Gikuyu language.

The era of independence is characterized by a proliferation of fictions dealing with the condition of women, authored by Sembene Ousmane (also cited as Ousmane Sembene) (b. 1923) and Mongo Beti (1932–2001), most notably. By the 1970s, pioneering women writers, such as Flora Nwapa (1931–1993), Mariama Ba (1929–1981), and Buchi Emecheta (b. 1944), had transformed the literary landscape by inventing writing modes appropriate to their denunciation of African patriarchy. They paved the way for new generations of women writers, represented by Calixthe Beyala (b. 1961) or Tsitsi Dangaremba (b. 1959), who unequivocally advocate feminism. Though southern African literature focused mainly on Apartheid until the mid-1990s, Bessie Head (1937–1986) and Miriam Tlali (b. 1936) have forcefully evoked women' struggles. North African literature has been no less prolific, with a mix of Francophone writers such as Kateb Yacine (1929–1989) and Assia Djebar (b. 1936) (a member of the French Academy since 2006) and others who publish in both Arabic and English, such as Naguib Mahfuz (1911–2006), winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature in 1988. Egyptian writer Nawal el Saadawi (b. 1931) is well known for her courageous stands on women's issues, circumcision and prostitution especially.

Contemporary African arts are thriving, as illustrated by the biennales held in Dakar, Senegal, and Johannesburg, South Africa, and by the canonization of African literature both in Europe and North America and in Africa. Contemporary artists and writers have made their mark by paying tribute to past generations, all the while breaking a number of taboos. These include the prohibition for both noncasted people and women to engage in certain artistic activities. Salif Keita (b. 1949), a descendant of the Malinke ruling family, transgressed this rule by becoming an internationally famous musician, and Ousmane Sembene provocatively defined the African writer as a griot. In the same spirit, Doudou Ndiaye Rose (b. 1928) has produced a band of drummers, exclusively composed of women.

Artists have further complexified the notion of African arts by multiplying the forms, medium, and materials of their expression. A strong tradition of modern painting has developed in the Congo, whereas photography, with Seydou Keita (1921–2001), and cinema, with Souleymane Cisse (b. 1940), Safi Faye (b. 1943) and Flora M'Mbugu-Schelling, have acquired a well-deserved transnational fame. Instead of limiting themselves to perishable materials, artists work also in cement, aluminum, plastic, or recycled objects. Although new sources of patronage—banks, government offices, churches, or foreign foundations—have recently surfaced, few African artists can live off their artistic output.

In troubled postcolonial times, African writers and artists share concerns about the definition of their identity. Whereas many remain committed to the future of their continent of origin, a sizable number assert their right to be recognized solely for the quality of their works.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Achebe, Chinua. 1958. Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann.

Appiah, Anthony. 1992. "The Postcolonial and the Postmodern" In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Blier, S. P. 1999. "African Art and Architecture," Africana, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Basic Civitas Books.

Leiris, M. 1996. "La crise nègre dans le monde occidental" Miroir de l'Afrique. Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1125-1159.

Musée du quai Branly. 2000. "Sculptures Luba." Sculptures. Afrique, Asie, Oceanie, Amériques. Paris: Seuil.

Steiner, Christopher. 1994. African Art in Transit. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Timeline of Art History—Africa. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Available from http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hm/04/af/hm04af.htm.

Vansina, Jan. 1984. Art History in Africa. London: Longman.

Visona', Monica Blackman, et al. 2001. A History of Art in Africa. New York: Harry N. Abrams.

Wilford, J. N. 2001. "Artifacts in Africa Suggest an Earlier Modern Human." New York Times, December 2, sec. 1A, p. 1.

Zahan, D. 1980. Antilopes du Soleil: Arts et rites agraires d'Afrique noire. Vienna: A. Schlend.

Zimmer, William 1999. "Art: Layers of Complexity in a Show of African Objects." New York Times, December 12.

Sylvie Kandé

IV. RELIGIONS

African indigenous religions have certain similar structures that are visible among the many diverse peoples of Africa, showing the interlinking relationships among the human, spiritual, and natural entities. Mythic narratives and ritual performances express and articulate, linguistically and symbolically, the gendered relationship and categorization within the African universe. Historian of religion Ninian Smart's (2006) presentation of the seven dimensions of religious phenomena is quite revealing of the components and structures of African indigenous thought. While mythic and ritual dimensions are crucial to indigenous religious expression, other aspects such as ethics, experience, social doctrines, images, and symbols are constructed and created from myths and rituals. The seven dimensions assist in understanding the nature and structure of African indigenous religions.

MYTHS, THE COSMOS, AND SPIRITUAL BEINGS

Like most other indigenous peoples, Africans have a variety of myths through which they define and express their existence in the cosmos. Most hold that many spiritual beings exist, with a supreme being at the apex. Deities who express the nature, character, and power of the Supreme Being are both male and female.

Supreme Beings

African communities have different names expressed in indigenous languages, which are descriptive of their perception of the Supreme Being. Most communities in Africa hold that the Supreme Being is male, largely due to the patriarchal nature of these communities. Some supreme beings are, however, either female or androgynous (both male and female). The Ashanti of Ghana, for instance, speak of Nyame as the great Mother who gives life to all, while the Ewe-speaking peoples of Ghana believe that Nana-Buluku, the Ancient Deity, is androgynous. The variations in the conception, description, and portrayal of supreme beings as male, female, or androgynous in most cases are due to the social structures and patterns of the different communities and localities. However, the roles of the supreme beings are both masculine and feminine.

The basic African conception envisions the Supreme Being as the originator of all existence. In all cases the Supreme Being possesses attributes such as omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, transcendence, immanence, and benevolence.

Deities

The deities (or divinities) are lesser spiritual beings that function in different capacities and manifest certain aspects and characters of the Supreme Being. These deities are capable of manifesting as human beings and natural phenomena. In fact, myths hold that some of the deities existed at different times both as human beings and natural phenomena. This notion supports the view that the deities exhibit both positive and negative human characteristics. The deities serve as intermediaries between the Supreme Being and human beings as well as other nonhuman entities. Human beings, who express the reality of the deities in ritual performances, present interlinking connections among the spiritual beings, the natural phenomena, and other unseen entities that populate the universe. The relationships of the human beings to both the Supreme Being and divinities are described in anthropological terms in some cases as fathers, mothers, and friends.

The Supreme Being in most mythic narrative created and continues to maintain the universe through the assistance and in collaboration with male and female deities. For instance, the male and female twins of Amma, the Dogon Supreme Being, were the progenitors of the human race. Among the Akan of Ghana (West Africa), Nyame created Okane, the first man, and Kyeiwaa, the first woman. The Mende myth of creation tells of Ngewo, who, after creating the earth and all things in it, made a man and woman to populate the universe. The Yoruba present a fascinating myth of creation and maintenance of the universe that includes male and female deities called òrìsà. After creating the òrìsà, Olódùmarè, the Supreme Being, delegates responsibility for the universe to his principal òrìsà, among whom are Obàtáálá, Òrúnmìlà, Ògún (males), and Òsun (female). Another prominent female deity who participates in the maintenance of the universe is Obà, a river deity. While the complementarity of the male and female deities is intrinsic and strong, Yoruba cosmology also teaches that female deities possess and exercise spiritual powers that could submerge those of their male counterparts.

Most African deities continue to function through the natural phenomena they embody, such as rain, wind, forest, and river. Some deities manifest as entities of the terrestrial universe, including the sun, moon, and stars. The male-female relationship makes vitality and productivity possible.

Most water deities serve as agents of human procreation and productivity. The deities have a role in fertility through ritual processes, thus sustaining the human community. Osun, Oya, and Yemoja, goddesses, exemplify this belief among the Yoruba and African Disapora.

Deities associated with the sky and rain are male, and fertilize the deities associated with the earth. According to the Edo of eastern Nigeria, Chukwu created Igwe, or Amadioha, the Sky deity, and Ala, the Earth deity; Igwe took the form of rain to fertilize Ala, his wife. Most male deities exhibit anger and hot-bloodedness, whereas female deities are gentle and cool. Examples of male-female complementary deities include Gua and Bosomtwe of the Akan (Ghana); Sango and Osun of the Yoruba (Nigeria); and Amadioha and Ala of the Igbo (Nigeria). Human beings explore and exploit their own complementary roles in procreation and productivity by participating in ritual practices.

RITES AND RITUAL PRACTICE

Ritual practice provides a context for the meeting of the spiritual, humans, and the natural world. In the spirit-nature-human relationship, the human body serves as the focal point for, and the center of, the connection through words, recited, uttered, and sung in ritual activities. Rivers and lakes symbolize female deities whereas hills and mountains perform that function for male deities. Natural elements such as iron and stone also represent male deities. The shrine of any particular deity often houses the emblems and symbols of deities of other sexes. Explanations for this are that, in ritual practices, (a) the male-female principle operates in the sense of primordial existence, which has continual relevance; and (b) male and female deities collaborate in ritual observances that are employed for human well-being and ordering of the universe. Moreover, symbols and emblems have practical utility in ritual practice. Participants believe that words used in the rituals possess creative and spiritual power.

Ritual prescriptions follow the male-female principle in response to primordial dictate. Worshipers offer deities ritual meals, specific to each deity and either offered up directly or consumed by humans as an indirect offering. Some meals are forbidden for particular deities. In most cases, prescriptions and taboos are dictated by the sex of the deity. Meals including liquids, such as the blood of hen and she-goat and water, which are characterized by coolness and softness, are appropriate for female deities, while rougher materials are prescribed for male deities. Shrines display the prescribed rituals. Worshipers sometimes place the meals of female deities at the shrines of male deities in an attempt to assuage the fury and that the latter show toward human beings.

Ritual provides a renewal, reinvigoration, revitalization, rejuvenation, and rebirth of spaces and times through the agency of human beings. Ritual activities based on mythic narratives often dictate, order, and empower processes of commitment and objectification.

RITES OF PASSAGE

Societies support rites of passage, otherwise called rites of transition, to transit its members from one stage of life to another. The first phase of transition includes naming and circumcision for boys and girls. In indigenous African religious communities, the girl children were circumcised on the seventh day after birth, the boy children on the ninth day. The next phase is puberty. The rites of transition for the female at this phase coincide with marriage rites and are usually performed when a girl's breasts begin to mature or at the onset of menstruation. The rites include food taboos and training in domestic responsibilities. A male adolescent may request the rites or the community may call for them based on the child's physical growth. Such rituals can involve symbolic death, which may in fact be fatal, and shaving the initiates' heads. Rites of passage involve seclusion for both males and females.

Marriage rites, usually communal and protracted, involve the extended families of the marriage partners. The rite culminates in an elaborate ceremony of gift-giving and merriment. The two families become one, staying intact through times of joy and sorrow.

Burial rites are the most elaborate in terms of significance, symbolism, and performance. Male burial rites are more important as a social event. The reasons for this are obvious: African societies are patriarchal and the social structure places men in positions of power. Men's burial rites are relatively longer than those of women. Women, however, are required to observe a long period of mourning for deceased husbands. They remain indoors and dress in dark clothing. Women shave their heads during this period in some cultures. Some societies forced a young widow to become the spouse of another member of the man's family, but this is no longer enforced.

RELIGIOUS SPECIALISTS

Religious specialists are priests and priestesses who consult the deities on behalf of individuals and communities. They serve male and female deities, that is, gods and goddesses. Chief priests and priestesses give instructions, prescribe rituals, and, where required, divine signs and omens. Ritual specialists also direct and participate prominently at annual and occasional indigenous festivals.

The most common categories of religious specialists, in addition to priests and priestesses, are mediums, diviners, herbalists, and witch-doctors. Their roles, however, are fluid and confusing. Whereas priests and priestesses have specific duties and full commitment to the shrines of their personal or community deities, diviners serve in a general capacity as mediums for the clients who consult them in times of distress and uncertainty. Priesthood may be assumed or ascribed through spirit possession, selection by the family through divine consultation, or training by senior ritual specialists. A religious specialist may assume several roles.

African priestesses participate prominently in festivals and ritual practices with specific and defined functions and roles. Their psychic abilities display in such activities as drumming, clapping, singing, and ecstatic movement, and they are skilled in extemporaneous singing and recitation of praise-poetry. Priests however exhibit spirituality more often through meditative actions. Though both perform divination, priests speak at length during the process. In some cases different instruments are used by priests and priestesses.

Sorcerers and witches constitute a unique spiritualist category. They are spiritual agents whom many African communities view as diabolical agents of terror. Sorcerers, predominantly male, are believed to possess the characteristics of good and evil, whereas witches, predominantly female, are believed to be essentially and inherently evil. Witchcraft, embodied in the image of old, ugly, haggard women who take the form of animals such as cats, lizards, and cockroaches, is a source of terror in some communities. Sorcerers and witches are indispensable in the scheme of ritual performance because priests and priestesses solicit their support and cooperation.

Priests and priestesses often collaborate in ritual performances, particularly with regard to healing. Different taboos exist for priests and priestess. Empowerment of priests and priestesses follows different patterns and ritual prescriptions.

Some African religious specialists reenact a community's pact with the deity instrumental in founding it. Priests and priestesses jointly engage in the renewal of shrines and other sacred places. Festival dramas, whether hegemonic, that is, marking the foundation of towns, or celebratory, commemorating other important events or persons, are done in the spirit of civil religiosity, where everybody who claims to belong to the community by origin, or lives in the community, regardless of their religious persuasions, is expected to participate.

During festival performances, ritual spiritualists wear costumes representing sex or gender roles. Notwithstanding their sexes, they often wear costumes of the deities that they serve and to which they are committed. In West Africa, performers at Gelede and Osun festivals put on female headdresses. Male Sango priests plait their hair in female patterns. These activities probably have primordial origins.

Other materials used in ritual practices and festivals are gender-ascribed, reflecting statuses and roles. A good example is the drum: Some drums are male, others female. Use of some drums is restricted by sex or deity.

CONTEMPORARY DEVELOPMENTS

Contemporary studies in African indigenous religions reveal the hidden resources in African sacred oral texts, contained in chants, corpus, songs, symbols, and proverbs. Researchers are moving away from colonial influences and early biased studies and views of African religions.

Early-twenty-first-century scholars recognize Islam and Christianity as African religions. Pentecostal and evangelical sects in Africa have done much to encourage women to refute the negative image of them imposed by early Christian missionaries. Islam has also made advances in gender issues. Women now establish and lead Muslim societies and movements.

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David O. Ogungbile

Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender: Culture Society History